Nest thermostat acquisition is Google’s home invasion

GOOGLE is knocking at your door. Last week, it shelled out &dollar;3.2 billion for smart-thermostat manufacturer Nest Labs of Palo Alto, California. So what does Google want with your central heating? And what could this mean for the future of “smart homes”?

The Nest thermostat is designed to learn when and how you like to heat your home. After a 12-day set-up period, the device has learned your basic schedule, is able to turn the heating on and off intelligently. In the process, it attempts to save you energy by only firing up the boiler when you truly need it.

A Google-enabled smart home of the future, using a platform such as the Google Now app – which already gathers data on users’ travel habits – could adapt energy usage to your life in even more sophisticated ways. “Imagine Google Now knows you’re on your way home,” suggests Sara Watson at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The thermostat can predict that you’re going to be home in 10 minutes and it can get the heat going.”

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The thermostat can predict that you’re going to be home in 10 minutes and it can get the heat going

Google had previously launched PowerMeter, a project to gather our energy-use data, but canned it in 2011.

“Now they have the missing piece of the puzzle,” says Daniel Obodovski, co-author of The Silent Intelligence&colon; The internet of things. “Now they have the thermostat that can regulate the cooling and heating and see who is at home and who is not at home.”

Google’s plans for Nest or any other future smart-home devices are not yet public knowledge. Indeed, Nest’s CEO, Tony Fadell, has said that for now he won’t even share data about Nest’s customers with Google.

Many expect that will change soon enough. Watson points to Google’s revised privacy policy of 2012, in which the company gave itself permission to combine and analyse data on each user across the various platforms they utilise. “Google’s entire data policy skews towards a consolidated view of one consumer. It seems pretty likely that that would be a future direction for any acquired company,” she says.

Some are concerned at how smart-home companies might profile people. George Danezis, who studies privacy engineering at University College London, argues that if Google ever launched a device that gathered data on electricity use in a home, they could theoretically surmise a great deal about the people who live there.

For example, there are methods of inferring what devices are being used in a home at any given moment. It’s an aspect of “non-intrusive load monitoring”, whereby the energy signatures of individual devices like your washing machine or TV can be picked up as part of the overall energy consumption of the house. Researchers in 2011 were even able to use a similar approach to determine what movie was being watched on a television set by making energy profiles of each film option. This was achieved by observing that a television’s electricity load will vary over time depending on whether dark or light scenes are being displayed to the viewer.

Danezis worries that such techniques could one day offer smart-home companies an “X-ray view” of your home.

Many, though, are upbeat about the prospect of Google-led smart-home technology. “I’m excited about it,” says Obodovski. “Instead of us adjusting to our homes, our homes will adjust to us.”